Recommended JSON parser in C?

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Best Way To Parse JSON in C?

I need to parse, validate and query JSON data in a C application, and I am looking for recommendations for the best C JSON library.

The data will be input as strings (char* UTF-8 data), which I first need to validate to ensure the input is valid JSON, and then I will need to perform some simple queries (iterating over the data).

I do not need to produce JSON, I only need to consume it. I also would prefer a parser that will load the whole document into memory rather than a SAX-style parser.

Can anyone recommend a good library, or does anyone have any experience or had problems with libraries?

I have seen the list of libraries in C on JSON.org - are there any good libraries missing from this list?

My requirements are for a small library with as little code / runtime size as possible, and a permissive BSD/MIT style license, since my library will be embedded in other applications.

Thanks,

Marc

Basile Starynkevitch · Answer 1 · 2013-12-13T05:46:04.330

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I'm recommending Jansson, which I find quite easy to use (and which loads the JSON in memory at once). However, I don't know well all the alternatives, and I don't have a working experience of all of them.

edited Dec 13 '13 at 05:46

answered Oct 25 '11 at 11:52

Basile Starynkevitch

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@Basile Starynkevitch, is there any JSON library which doesn't uses dynamic allocations? – Akay Apr 16 '16 at 11:43
No, and I don't believe there can be one: JSON values could be arbitrarily large, so need to be heap allocated. – Basile Starynkevitch Apr 16 '16 at 13:12

mloskot · Answer 2 · 2018-12-06T09:51:13.723

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I would choose json-c which is a fast and easy to use JSON parser written in C.

edited Dec 06 '18 at 09:51

answered Oct 25 '11 at 11:27

mloskot

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Have you had any experience with it? Are there any reasons why it is better/worse than the other options? – Marc O'Morain Oct 25 '11 at 15:57
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I have experience with json-c and only with json-c, so I can't compare against others. It is, for me, json-c just works. so I recommended it. – mloskot Oct 25 '11 at 16:25
@JayElston Thanks. Fixed. – mloskot Dec 06 '18 at 09:51

Recommended JSON parser in C?

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